Optical techniques for droplet manipulation are attractive because they provide a contactless dynamic manipulation of droplets. and do not require specific substrate structures. Current approaches include, for example, so-called optical tweezers. Optical tweezers are not ideally suited for droplet manipulation because they exert a relatively low force on a droplet. The force that an optical tweezer can exert on a droplet ranges in an order of magnitude of picoNewtons (pN). For droplets of sizes of several hundreds of micrometers, such forces are insufficient to move the droplet at any significant velocity. Further, the forces have been found to be typically repulsive. Optoelectronic tweezers (OET) have been adapted to manipulated droplets with a force in a range of nanoNewtons (nN). Optoelectronic tweezers typically require on-chip electrodes providing an in-plane AC electric field.